EPCOT flower and garden festival

I returned yesterday from my visit to the Flower and Garden Festival held every year at Epcot Center in Disney World. This year’s event was by far the best ever.

There were amazing topiaries everywhere in the park, all of them made exclusively from plants and flowers.

The butterfly pavillion was out of this world. In the butterfly house were cocoons, many of them opening up and releasing their precious contents and hundreds of mature butterflies flying around.

The floating gardens

The Pixie Hollow Garden where Tinkerbell and her fairie friends live was a favorite of my family.

Displays on green gardening with great ideas for conservationists.

At World Showcase, the displays featured each country’s native gardens.

Japan was all about bonsais with some incredible examples of this ancient Japanese art, some many decades old!

Italy featured container gardens–aren’t they lovely?

In Germany, the main attraction was the miniature garden and railroad.

China had this magnificent dragon created from all types of bromeliads.

My family and I had a great time and we are already planning next year’s visit for the 2010 festival, to be held March 3 – May 16. If you have never been, I strongly recommended this delightful and beautiful exhibit.

EMPTY NESTERS

The last Robin is reluctant to leave home

Just two short weeks ago the 3 robin eggs hatched and we watched Mother Robin work from dawn to dusk to feed her babies every few minutes.

It’s amazing how quickly they grow but I guess that’s what happens when you eat every 5 or 10 minutes.

Yesterday we watched as the first two brave ones flew off on their own. The last one was not so eager to leave home and it took a lot of coaxing from Mom to get it to fly away.

As empty nesters we know the feeling of raising our young and have them leave one by one. It is both joy and sorrow.

Mason Bees - Class of 2010

Thanks to my neighbor, I have a starter block with nested mason bees! She saw my post about the Garden Tour and the bee attraction. They have been housing bees for years and placed out some starter blocks for the nesting bees. A good way to share them with others.

I realized it was just the right size to fit in a bird box we had that was really the wrong size for any birds we’re likely to get. DH took the front off of the box, and it will be a perfect fit.

Plus, DH cut and drilled more blocks to fill up the house (along with the nest-filled block) and extras. Think we’ll add the shingles to the top of the little house and then use others to make a little roof for a condo of the extra blocks. We’ll hang them in two different areas to see if we might still attract a few more nesters this year.

The drilled hole are 5/16 inch diameter and about 3 inches deep. We used untreated 2×4 boards we had in our misc. wood collection. We’ll hang them where they are a little protected from the weather and have a morning sun exposure, but not the strong afternoon sun.

Thanks for sharing, Neighbor!

Pinellias I Have Loved And Grown

Pinellias, somewhat horticulturally reclusive cousins to jack in the pulpits, are among my favorites in our garden. This is Pinellia ‘Polly Spout’. It is a chance hybrid between P. tripartita Atropurprea (a fairly aggressive seeder) and P. pedatisecta (a truly awesome seeder). Fortunately, Polly Spout is sterile (a triploid, I assume). It does offset into a nice, fairly compact clump (most other pinellias run like bandits, popping up, it would seem by perverse choice, at ridiculous distances from the mother plant). Polly was discovered in the old We-Du nursery, and named after a famous spring that now forms a pond at the nursery, Polly’s Spout (We-Du is now Meadowbrook Nursery).
Polly Spout shows a slightly purple spathe (hood), with a very tall, upright spadix (jack), and tall, lush tripartite foliage, looking like a dark green, waxy jack in the pulpit. It stays in bloom essentially all summer and always looks great. As I mentioned, it’s sterile, but I still can’t fathom why it’s fairly expensive, because it is a strong, carefree plant that divides readily and steadily… I figure next year I can start potting some up as giveaways for garden visitors.

Rose Campion as a Companion Plant

Over the last few years, I’ve been trying different “filler” plants to grow between the perennials until they mature.

Rose campion (Lychnis coronaria) is now one of my favorites for this role.

I have several clumps spread throughout my deer resistant gardens where it keeps company with stachys, salvia, spirea, lavender, nepeta and agastache. Annual larkspur, sown from seed in the fall, has joined the rose campion as a filler plant.

The fuzzy, silver foliage of rose campion is tall enough (two to three feet) to send the flowering branches above other plants along the slopes in the gardens. The base is a rosette of fuzzy leaves and the spiking branches pop out above the base. In my zone 7b garden, the foliage is evergreen during the winter months.

Besides being deer and rabbit resistant, it is a drought tolerant, easy-keeper! After the blooms have finished, I cut back the spikes to the base foliage. It blooms again, but not as full as the first bloom.

Although it reseeds, but there hasn’t been a population explosion in my garden due to my dead-heading. I need to leave a few more flowers for more seedlings this time. I have found a few tiny rosettes around the mother plants and have easily relocated those to fill in gaps while waiting for perennials to mature. In fact, the seedlings even sprouted among the rocks in the dry stream! This old-fashioned plant is short-lived and suitable for sunny locations in zones 3-9.

My original rose campion was purchased in pots from a garden nursery, but you can sow the seeds directly in the fall as the seeds like a little chill. This makes it a great seed to sow at the same time as annual larkspur and poppies.

Story and photos by Freda Cameron; Location: home garden; May 2009

Gardening News, Magazines, Travel and My Blog

Pinellias I Have Loved And Grown

Pinellias, somewhat horticulturally reclusive cousins to jack in the pulpits, are among my favorites in our garden. This is Pinellia ‘Polly Spout’. It is a chance hybrid between P. tripartita Atropurprea (a fairly aggressive seeder) and P. pedatisecta (a truly awesome seeder). Fortunately, Polly Spout is sterile (a triploid, I assume). It does offset into a nice, fairly compact clump (most other pinellias run like bandits, popping up, it would seem by perverse choice, at ridiculous distances from the mother plant). Polly was discovered in the old We-Du nursery, and named after a famous spring that now forms a pond at the nursery, Polly’s Spout (We-Du is now Meadowbrook Nursery).
Polly Spout shows a slightly purple spathe (hood), with a very tall, upright spadix (jack), and tall, lush tripartite foliage, looking like a dark green, waxy jack in the pulpit. It stays in bloom essentially all summer and always looks great. As I mentioned, it’s sterile, but I still can’t fathom why it’s fairly expensive, because it is a strong, carefree plant that divides readily and steadily… I figure next year I can start potting some up as giveaways for garden visitors.

Busy Like Bees

With nice weekend weather, we’ve been busy bees, indeed. Really shouldn’t try to catch up the whole spring in a weekend or two, though! Some fun, some progress and any reason to be outside is a good one. Above, the bees must be able to get what they want from the outside of the columbine also. Some went inside, others went for the outside crown.

The columbine shapes are amazing as they go from new blossoms to full flowers. I’ll have to collect seeds from the plants with the rose colored flowers. There are only a few of them this year.

The flowers are actually more of a purple. The photos always have more of a blue color and I’ve never tried tweaking the settings to see if I can capture their real color.

More weekend projects to post about soon.

Two Good Things

Every garden is a bit hit or miss; two things that have recently worked out well here are, at top, sinking a plastic tub in the ground to grow primula japonica in, and at bottom, a large oval raised, shaded flower bed with a pathway all around it.

A Few Scenes from Paris

We stayed in a perfect, petite studio apartment overlooking the Seine. View from our apartment window - that’s the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) across the river:

Parisians take their dogs everywhere. This fellow was dining with owners at a cafe:

Saint-Sulpice was behind scaffolding, so I took a close-up of the lion in the fountain:

There are pedestrian-only streets throughout Paris. We walked through Rue Montorgueil on our way to Sacre Coeur in Montparnasse. We crossed through an indoor shopping area with interesting architecture. The patisserie windows are stocked full of colorful goodies:

The arch at the Louvre lines up with Place de la Concord and the Arche de Triomphe in the distance:

An entrance to the Paris Metro near the flower market:

During our visit to the Luxembourg Gardens, I asked a woman if I could photograph her little dog who she put into her tote bag to carry:

I enjoy taking photos of architecture, such as this bridge close-up. The light shining on the green paint highlighted the details:

A great restaurant in the Marais neighborhood. It has been reviewed in the NY Times and we can add to that recommendation for the best fallafel!

This was a unique approach for earning a little income:

Pont Neuf (a bridge) was our favorite evening spot for photographing sunsets and nightfall:

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